How realistic are assassins? Can they be professionals? Is it actually possible to kill a high priority target and get away or do most assassins get caught? Many famous assassins were ones who were caught though; Brutus, Booth, Oswald, Princip.

Every name you listed there was a political fanatic. I don’t mean this to be dismissive, because, that is one kind of assassin, but they’re not professionals.

Those are people who have a political message and were willing to die to get attention. (Oswald’s a little of an edge case there. But, the basic idea stands.) These are people who wanted to send a message. That’s completely different from someone who is paid to kill a target and disappear.

Someone screaming “Sic Simper Tyrannis!” before taking someone’s head off, is a very different breed of killer from the kind that sits in an office building and takes a single shot before vanishing.

To be honest, I’m not sure what else to say on the subject, that we haven’t covered already. Though, we probably should do a piece on the psychology of terrorists and fanatics, but that’ll have to wait for another day.